Come Full Circle
by Aixyutin
Summary: It's been many years and although his skin is young, his heart is not. But peace is not everything, and late is still better than never. Kilik x Xianghua


Author's Notes: I haven't played the games since Soul Calibur III, but recently I went on wikipedia and checked out the storyline. When I realized what they'd done to my favorite SC pairing, and after I swallowed the fury and injustice of it all, this drabble-turn-oneshot was spawned.

* * *

**Come Full Circle**

There's a whisper, sometimes, somewhere.

The years have passed and although his face remains as chiseled and as little-wrinkled since that fated day, his heart is growing old.

When he passes through humanity nowadays, he no longer feels resentment or even disgust. He sees their petty jealousies and their doubts as a rough veneer to the purity underneath. Kilik believes there is good. The good is often buried deep, but there is good.

It is a view she would have approved of.

There was a time, long ago, when he would glare at a silly maid whose too-flirtatious gaze would linger just a little too long, but now he only looks, notices, and says nothing. Not that there are many fair maids looking anymore. Even if his skin looks young, his eyes and the way he pauses to see an old beggar on the street is so telling. He pauses at the old beggar not with pity, but with the sad knowing that only age and experience brings, something a young hothead would never understand.

Nowadays, he can sense the very change of the wind. The howl of a wolf makes him shiver, not in fear, but in anticipation and there are times he can sense the moment a kill is made; the forest, nature always gives a sigh when a life is taken in this constant struggle for dominance, and he feels it.

Kilik's ascended to a nirvana few humans have ever experienced and still, still, her name whispers.

Sometimes, he can go for days without thinking of her, but then he would hear the twinkle of a young girl's laugh, and then there she would be. He stifles the thoughts well enough in the daylight, but at night, even his disciplined mind slips and the memories—

It isn't just images. It's looking at his fingers, knowing these callused things have pressed, touched, caressed forbidden places. It's rubbing his neck and suddenly remembering how she would scrape her teeth lightly, so teasingly lightly against that spot right behind his ear lobe. She liked to do that, and she would do it until he swatted her away, whereupon she would lick her way down to the curve of his collarbone.

It really isn't just the lust however. Lust is a physical thing, easily conquered. It's the longing that still gets him, this old man in this young skin.

People say love is an emotion felt for another person. It isn't. Love is the emotion invoked by the presence of said person.

So no, if Kilik were to pinpoint it, he wouldn't say he missed Xianghua. Rather, he missed the security, the sense of how good it felt to be alive and holding this particular woman, this particular woman in a world of millions. This woman who made the his world sing, twist, even burn.

Truth to be told, even after all the choices he's made, Kilik misses the Kilik he was with for Xianghua. If he had been another man, or more precisely, the same man but with a different past, shewould have been enough. But even love is not enough to find peace, and so he left. But now he has peace.

Kilik finds himself wondering whether peace is enough.

* * *

When he sees Xiba, he knows. Just like he could pick out Xianghua from a million women, so he can distinguish Xiba from a million boys. Xiba has his mother's eyes, eyes that smile even before his mouth does.

Xiba doesn't recognize him. Why would he? But Maxi, Maxi with his past and his cursed instinct; Maxi suspects, although he never outright asks. It's almost oddly fitting that Maxi, this rogue who fits so strangely and yet so neatly into the tangled miasma that is Xianghua-and-Kilik, would be the one to act as father-figure to Xiba.

Kilik says nothing, speaks of nothing, but he wonders. He wonders if he'd known, would he have stayed, would he have—

Xiba is the legacy, the living memory of Xianghua-and-Kilik. The world will forget the great tragedies and the great miracles, but Xiba is proof that all those memories, both good and bad, have existed.

He's a beautiful boy, more beautiful than Kilik deserves.

"He's never met his mother either," Maxi says one day.

"Ah."

"Funny isn't it?" Maxi watches the wind whip his old friend's hair, hiding his eyes and profile. "How everything turned out."

Kilik hasn't felt anger in a long time, but an ember of that old emotion flickers. He turns toward the pirate.

Maxi raises his hands and shrugs, a mockery of the old carefree gesture, because even if he makes the same motions, there's too much knowing and bitterness in the line of his body now. "You should find her."

Finding her would be overturning the work of decades. Finding her would be breaking the peace.

"I haven't seen her, but I've heard the rumors. She's a beautiful woman—it's rumored the Prince wanted her, but of course, nothing came out of it. She's married to a general now, you must have known."

Kilik did know.

"I want to ask her if she's happy, but I doubt they'll let someone like myself get anywhere near those noble houses." Maxi squints. "Although your clothes are shit, I don't think they'll turn you away."

"What makes you think I want to go?" Kilik asks, curious despite himself.

"Peace is all well and good, but don't you miss it? The hum in your bones, vibrating as if they'll come out of your own skin? Come on, don't look as if you've never felt it."

Kilik had felt it, once upon a time.

"You know, I only ever felt that while we were—you know. Back then, when we didn't even know if we'll die the next day, I felt alive. But she looked like that, even when you guys weren't killing something." The pirate fingers his nun-chucks. "She looked like that when she looked at you."

"I don't know you, but I'm willing to wager a fair bit that you understand what I'm saying," is the pirate's goodbye. Kilik murmurs something more appropriate, something that might have been as meaningless as "until next time", before he turns and leaves.

Xiba openly protests when they leave. After all, this man who still hasn't told him his name gives them food and shelter; what was the rush? But Maxi shakes his head and shoves the boy forward. There's only so much a human heart can take, even a human heart as brave as Kilik's.

* * *

It doesn't take as long as he thought it would to convince himself.

When he sees her, he almost speaks. Unlike Maxi and himself, time has touched Xianghua. Her dark hair, soft as a swallow's wing, is oiled and as fine as any proper noble lady, but she no longer brightens the room. She's learned to fade away, unseeing, like another expensive vase in her husband's home. Motherhood has changed her body too. Although the clothes cover her, Kilik thinks he can almost see how her elbows and knees have rounded. She's no longer a nymph, no fairy who hums with energy, energy so bright that anyone who stood in her way was blinded by it even before they ever saw the glint of her sword. In a way, she's become more dangerous. She's borne the worst injuries any warrior and woman could ever bear, and she's survived.

Xianghua feels no fear anymore.

She dismisses her maids and does not speak until they are alone. Still, she will not meet his eyes, looks only at his shoulder, his neck—it is not his imagination, her eyes really do linger in that spot she used to tease with her teeth.

"Have you come to take me away?"

He's shocked. There were many things he's thought on the road to here, scenarios, words exchanged in the past and analyzed until they became meaningless. He had not expected this however. This is Xianghua, who was love, is love, but is also duty and loyalty.

Xianghua plucks at her yellow robe, finer than anything Kilik's ever seen. "I've worn these long enough. I've paid my dues. My son's an official, my daughter's on her way to breaking her heart—even I can't stop her, just like my grandfather couldn't stop my mother, or me all those years ago." There's a smile somewhere, he hears it, but it sounds too sad to be called a smile.

"And now you're here. We've come full circle." Her eyes look up at him and now he sees. Even with the sad-wrinkles and the loss of youthful pink, her lips and eyes are as beautiful as ever. "Have you found your peace?"

This question, at least, has an easy enough answer. "Yes."

She gives a long, breathy exhale that says more than any smile and word.

"I love you."

Kilik does not close his eyes.

"So, I ask again, Kilik. Have you finally come to take me away? Will you finally give me peace in the time we have left?"

Until now, neither have acknowledged the difference in mortality. Xianghua will grow old and die. Kilik will not.

Looking into her eyes, Kilik realizes that Xianghua does not blame him. Even after all this time, she does not begrudge his decisions.

"Will this make you happy?" he asks, just to be sure.

Xianghua doesn't answer with words. She reaches out and touches him. It starts only as a light touch, a finger on a callused palm, but then there's her shoulders in his arms, his hand in her wealth of hair, and there's her mouth on his.

Kilik takes her away.

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I know this is a little fandom, but if any of you appreciated or didn't appreciate this, I would love to hear from you!

Review :)


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